When individuals and students watch presentations at a conference or receive instruction in a classroom environment, the individuals will often take notes regarding that which they see and learn. A common practice by speakers and teachers is to project slides onto a large display screen for use as visual aids during the presentation or class. The individuals attending the presentation or class often copy entire slides by hand in the course of taking notes. However, often the speaker or instructor moves too fast, and displays the next slide before an individual can copy the previous one.
In addition, individuals often request a copy of a data file even though she may only need a specific item from the file. For instance, a conference attendee may request a copy of a forty-slide PowerPoint® presentation given by a conference speaker because the attendee wants a copy of the statistics located on slide fifteen. The attendee gives her email address to the speaker, who later emails the attendee a copy of the complete presentation, using more storage space than if the speaker could send, or otherwise provide, only a copy of the requested slide to the attendee. In addition, the speaker must expend time to prepare and send the email to the requester.
Thus, it would be an advancement in the art to provide an automated system that allows individuals to capture content as it is displayed on a display screen, such as by using a mobile or portable device.
However, portable devices' storage capacities are often limited and prohibitively small for capturing data files generated from or stored on a conventional PC computer. If a user wants to copy a data file from a conventional PC, and the user does not have a storage medium (e.g., floppy disk) with enough storage capacity to copy the wanted data file, the user cannot copy the file. Portable devices such as mobile telephones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) often include only limited storage capacities, e.g., 8 MB up to 64 MB, compared to 10 gigabyte (GB) to 100 GB hard drives on conventional PCs. Thus, users often cannot copy data files using only a portable device, as the device may not contain enough free memory to copy the entire data file.
One known solution to this problem is to send the wanted data file via a computer network to a requestor's email inbox or network storage drive. However, network storage drives, including those used to store emails, quickly become saturated as users forward copies of data files to large email and network distribution lists. In addition, the email system may store multiple copies of the data file, one for each user receiving it, and the receiving users may each then save a copy of the data file to their own network drive. Furthermore, these forwarded data files may be stored but never read by the requesting user(s), thus wasting limited storage space.
A known solution to the above problem is to edit the file before sending it to the requesting user, so that only the requested slide is sent. The presenter can also restrict and/or redact specific slide content within the presentation, for the purposes of protecting the content or other proprietary information, before sending any slides to the requesting user. However, this is time consuming and quickly becomes tedious as multiple users each request different portions of the same file.
Thus, it would be an advancement in the art to provide a system that allows users to copy data files using a portable device with limited storage capacity. It would be another advancement in the art to provide a system that allows users to copy an image on a display screen or a portion of a file at a user's or file owner's discretion, rather than being required to copy the entire file. It would be a further advancement if the system could provide, to a requesting user, a pointer to a storage location from which the user could later retrieve the file. It would be a further advancement in the art to provide an automated system for distributing data content on demand that requires minimal effort by a file provider.